Orchestral manoeuvres

Simon Rattle describes him as 'the most astonishingly gifted conductor he has ever met'. And yet 26-year-old Gustavo Dudamel grew up in poverty in Venezuela. Ed Vulliamy tells the story of El Sistema - a remarkable youth project which uses Beethoven and Brahms to save the children of the barrios

The massed musicians surge towards the climax of the Alpine symphony by Richard Strauss - an epic contemplation of nature, scored for one of the biggest orchestras ever; an evocation of mighty mountains by the composer who occupied some bridge between fin-de-siecle romanticism and the brand of decadent modernism of early 20th-century Vienna.

But the scene outside the concert hall could hardly be in starker counterpoint to Alpine peaks or the final throes of Habsburg Empire. While the young musicians and their audience had mingled during the interval on a balcony, the landscape below was tropical twilight: the concrete jungle of Caracas, capital of Venezuela, during the steaming wet season, salsa throbbing from unrelenting traffic while murals exalt the insurgent President Hugo Chavez. Down the hills that trap the smog tumble makeshift barrios where most of the city's 5m people gouge out a living.

Yet Strauss - or the music of any other composer - is rarely played to this standard. Indeed, as major figures in classical music concur, these performers - the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela - are a phenomenon. Named after the man who led the uprisings against the Spanish colonial yoke, these young musicians are beating established European ensembles to record for the world's most regal classical-music label, Deutsche Grammophon. And tonight in Caracas the orchestra, under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle, will inaugurate a new $35m Inter-American Center for Social Action Through Music, thereby crowning the city as one of the world capitals of music. But with a difference: these young musicians come for the most part from desperate shantytowns, not the conservatoires of Vienna or Berlin.

Attention has been focused on the 26-year-old prodigy conducting Strauss, with his mop of curls reminiscent of a young Rattle, his passion and electrifying communication with the musicians from among whose ranks he came as a violinist: Gustavo Dudamel. Rattle himself calls Dudamel 'the most astonishingly gifted conductor I have ever come across'. Earlier this year, the musical directorship of the Los Angeles Philharmonic - arguably the best orchestra in America - became vacant. The orchestra chose Dudamel after a couple of guest appearances during which the Venezuelan shot what the orchestra's president Deborah Borda called 'contagious joy' through the seasoned musicians. 'We had combustion,' she said. 'We knew something remarkable had happened.'

But this is more than the story of one prodigy, himself from a poor family on the outskirts of Barquisimeto in the Venezuelan interior. This is about what Dudamel calls 'music as social saviour'. He and his orchestra are but the apex of a unique enterprise; the zenith of something deeply rooted in Venezuela, formally entitled the National System of Youth and Children's Orchestras of Venezuela, but known simply as El Sistema. Inspired and founded in 1975 under the slogan 'Play and fight!' by the extraordinary social crusader Jose Antonio Abreu, El Sistema flourished with a simple dictum: that in the poorest slums of the world, where the pitfalls of drug addiction, crime and despair are many, life can be changed and fulfilled if children can be brought into an orchestra to play the overwhelmingly European classical repertoire.

And that is what happened. The road taken by Dudamel and his orchestra is one along which some 270,000 young Venezuelans are now registered to aspire, playing music across a land seeded with 220 youth orchestras from the Andes to the Caribbean. Rattle, music director of the mighty Berlin Philharmonic, describes El Sistema as 'nothing less than a miracle... From here, I see the future of music for the whole world.' But, adds Sir Simon, 'I see this programme not only as a question of art, but deep down as a social initiative. It has saved many lives, and will continue to save them.'

Across Venezuela, young barrio-dwellers now spend their afternoons practising Beethoven and Brahms. They learn the 'Trauermarsch' from Mahler's fifth symphony while their peers learn to steal and shoot. They are teenagers like Renee Arias, practising Bizet's Carmen Suite at a home for abandoned and abused children, who when asked what he would be doing if he had not taken up the French horn, replies straightforwardly: 'I'd be where I was, only further down the line - either dead or still living on the streets smoking crack, like when I was eight.' Or children like Aluisa Patino, 11, who states plainly that she learns the viola 'to get myself and my mother out of the barrio. It's got to the point around here,' she chirps as she leads us through a maze of alleyways to her humble home, 'where it's much cooler to like Strauss than salsa.'

Dudamel's rehearsals for the Alpine symphony approach their end. It is even more compelling to watch Dudamel in rehearsal than in performance - this combination of intensity and charm, severity and exuberance. Rehearsing the young orchestra that has been his life and is now his springboard, Dudamel always uses the expression 'Let's do this', never 'Do it this way.' He talks the musicians through the piece's meaning as well as its structure: 'Let's consider each bar as part of the whole,' he coaxes, 'as I think Strauss wants us to feel part of the perfect union of the whole - a philosophical reflection by man confronted with nature.' He loves crescendos - 'Let's give it some push!' - and as he rehearses the hushed finale which the musicians must perform in pitch black, he exhales, as the lights dim. 'Let's take it down - right down - slowly - turn it off"... until there is silence and darkness. 'Ah, si!' sighs Dudamel, breaking the spell, and everyone applauds.

Dudamel and I talk in a subterranean cave beneath the new Inter-American Center. Just as painters prefer to talk about colour and light more than about abstractions and personal detail, we begin with his singular interpretation of the Alpine symphony, which he gives an unusually human dimension. 'That,' says Dudamel, 'is exactly the special thing about what we do. We have never played that piece before, not I nor the musicians. How can a group of people encounter one of the great pieces about man and nature without feeling that they matter? We talked the piece through, tried to understand together, and play as we felt. It's about the score, dynamics, tempo and colours, of course - but also about feeling. We play it for the first time, but also as though it were the last - for love.' At the Proms on 19 August, Dudamel and the orchestra will play Shostakovich's 10th symphony - the discourse this time not nature but the most intriguing political narrative in 20th-century culture: Shostakovich's life and work on the rack of Soviet communism. 'Of course, we discuss Shostakovich's life behind the piece,' says Dudamel, 'how he existed under Stalin, introducing nuances and codes in what he wrote, hidden political messages in musical form...'

We continue in this vein until the irrepressible young man recounts his own story. His father, he says, played salsa trombone, 'and that was the sound of my childhood. But there was classical music, too, and in that regard my grandmother was my mentor. Anyway, my arms were too short to play the trombone, however hard I tried.' So Gustavo joined the choir at the local Nucleo - as the Sistema's neighbourhood orchestrasare called - then took up the violin before conducting two years later. The salsa never left Dudamel's DNA, however - as he says of leaving Caracas for Los Angeles: 'I'll miss my orchestra, but I will never leave them. They're family; I grew up with them. But Los Angeles is more like meeting a girl at a salsa dance. You have a dance, then meet her again and have another dance which is a little more sexy. Well, one thing leads to another, and eventually you get engaged, then married, and the honeymoon begins...'

One can't help feeling the 'family' remains Dudamel's great love. 'These musicians are my blood,' he says, 'my best friends, my brothers and sisters. I've played with 80 per cent of them; they don't really see me as their conductor, and I don't see myself that way either. There's collective pressure, but in a positive way. If a musician gets ahead of the group, the group must follow - that's how the social aspect of El Sistema feeds the music we make. But from now on, in Los Angeles and Gothenburg [where Dudamel is also principal conductor] it will be different. With every orchestra I work with, I will have to weld a relationship, to understand its special personality, to lead and follow.'

Inevitable comparisons are made between Dudamel and his champion, Rattle. But there is something in the mix of Dudamel's electricity and communication with his orchestra, cranking up that extra notch of commitment, which invokes more the indefatigable Russian Valery Gergiev, only without the ego. (After one of his guest performances in Los Angeles, a cellist, Gloria Lum, remarked: 'There are many conductors who are technically perfect, but they are so taken with themselves as opposed to the music. With Dudamel, there is no artifice, no ego.')

The Alpine symphony is particularly demanding for the bassoon, which Edgar Monroy, 22, packs away, his hair spiked with gel. Edgar's journey home is via Caracas's (estimable) subway, then minibus up a steep, pitted road to the ramshackle barrio of San Andres, into which one climbs, winding step by winding step, past breeze-block shacks with roofs of corrugated iron and zinc crammed together in the humid heat. Edgar's home, which he shares with his parents, sister and baby niece, hides its poverty behind careful upkeep and radiant pride at what Edgar has achieved.

'There are times when the rehearsals end late and I daren't come home - it's just too dangerous; I stay in town,' says Edgar with the puckish grin of any lad his age. He joined the local Nucleo 'and they gave me a bassoon because it was the only instrument for which there was a vacancy'. There were no private classes - nor money for them - just orchestral practice at Caracas racetrack whether or not there was horse racing that day. 'It's hard to say what happened exactly,' says Edgar. 'I fell in love with the music, though it was strange to me. I motivated myself and started to dream this could be my future.

'Our experience is reflected in how we play,' he says. 'Most of us are from the barrios and that's our bond - to rise above what happens where we live.' Edgar still has 'a few friends I used to hang around with' who never joined, even sneered at, El Sistema. 'People I've known since I was a kid who've become delinquents - problems with drugs and crime. Bad things happen every day around here. I don't often keep my instrument at home because it's likely to get stolen. But now most of my friends are musicians; we're a family as well as an orchestra.'

One feature of the Simon Bolivar orchestra is how many of them leave rehearsals hand in hand. 'My girlfriend's a bassoonist, too, called Alejandra,' says Edgar. 'You see, it's not just about music - it's a way of looking at life and yourself. I mean, look at me and where I live. There are kids here who never leave the barrio for weeks, and never will. But I'm off to England, Germany and the USA to play. Maybe it's ironic,' he reflects, 'that the music is classical, from Europe. But it's a strong tradition and has opened up our world, told us who Mozart and Beethoven were, that they could be ours and give us an escape.'

We go for a walk. Some houses don't have roofs at all, and outside one, a young man of Edgar's age sits cross-legged in a plastic chair, his eyes glazed, skin pock-marked, motionless. Edgar hardly notices, chatting as he climbs the steps: 'I like Brahms best - so romantic - but my favourite is Shostakovich's ninth, because of the long bassoon solo!'

Musicians like Edgar are not moulded overnight. They work, need to be worked on, and often begin young. As they do at the Nucleo in the barrio of Sarria, operating after hours at the Jose Marti Bolivarian School. 'In school,' says the Nucleo's director Rafael Elster, 'you don't see the poverty outside. You watch these kids play, but sometimes their parents are the drug dealers and car thieves.' It is in these barrios that Chavez offers one kind of redemption and is heartily supported, while El Sistema offers another, to a mixed reaction.

'At first,' says Gladiani Herrarra, a violin teacher, 'they can reject you and the music. They're afraid of everything in their lives, and it takes time to break down the wall.' 'There was one girl,' recalls Rafael, 'who I asked to shut her eyes to better listen to a piece. She refused, terrified to close her eyes with anyone else in the room.' 'Physical abuse,' says Gladiani, 'is often the first thing to overcome.'

People like Rafael are the spine of El Sistema. He studied trumpet at the Juilliard in New York, has won numerous prizes and could have embarked on a lambent career. 'But I prefer this,' he says. 'I've taught all over the world, but never enjoyed myself more. A lot of them stay to finish other school studies only because of the music. To be honest, some of them scare me at first. But most of them don't have a father. I become a sort of father, and they become my sort of children.' Genesis, 11, says her friends 'keep telling me to quit the orchestra. They think it's shit and go around kissing boys. But I think actually they're jealous.'

Rafael mounts the podium of the school theatre and takes the orchestra through Sibelius's Finlandia, a single-movement symphonic poem, symbolising Finnish nationalism. 'These are the young kids,' he cautions. 'There's a critical point around 13. If we can keep them, their lives will change, otherwise we lose them forever.'

Many teenagers living at Los Chorros, a residential shelter for runaway and abused children, recall lives from which few recover. Los Chorros still exudes the aura of its former existence as a 'correctional facility' for arrested street children - there are still bars on the windows of some buildings - but from the main hall come the lilting melodies of Bizet's Carmen Suite. Angel Linarez had explained that he was a car thief before training as a musician and working for El Sistema, and now greets some of the youngsters he taught when they were waifs a decade ago.

Miguel Nino is a swarthy cellist with long hair, but aged six had 'fled my home in Barinas because of physical aggression by my father', and came to the capital to make a home on its streets. 'The police caught me,' he says both simply and evasively, 'and brought me here, where the orchestra caught my attention, something different. And now, I play, study, want to be a professional musician and raise a family. If I hadn't found music? Obviously I'd have gone back on to the streets to steal, beg and take drugs.'

The leader of Los Chorros's orchestra, tipped for a professional future, is Patricia Gujavro. Her face while playing looks as though it knows more than her 17 years should afford, but her lachrymose expression unexpectedly vanishes when she speaks, breezily. Patricia lives in Palo Verde barrio with her two brothers. Her father has 'never been in the family' and her mother disappeared to Ecuador last year. 'I've thought a lot about what my life would have been like if I hadn't started the violin,' she says. 'I suppose I'd be like most 17-year-old girls in Palo Verde - hanging with the gangs and pregnant. One of my friends is 17, with a kid and pregnant again, and no idea how to support them. That... well, that hasn't happened to me yet.' Her ambition, inevitably: 'to join the Simon Bolivar orchestra'- if not, become an engineer, music having 'given me discipline, respect for other people and for myself, unlike the other girls'.

Some of El Sistema's guiding hands have been there since the outset, when beside Jose Antonio Abreu was a teenaged music student called Igor Lanz, who now directs the project. 'The main purpose,' he says, 'is not just to make music for its own sake, but to teach the equilibrium between competition and cooperation. To be great, you must drive towards excellence - but there's no experience like reading off the same score, bar by bar, as everyone else. What amazes me is that this balance is working: the more children join the system, the standard, rather than dilute, gets higher.'

A meeting with maestro Abreu himself is like an encounter with a popular cardinal, between his appointments with children and the powerful - which makes sense, since Abreu's deep Catholic faith has been almost as much a propulsion as his love of music. He exudes a sense of iron will wrapped in wisdom and civility, describing his own childhood experience of music as 'immense joy in a place where life was hard'. Parallel to his studies in Caracas as an organist and composer, Abreu took an economics degree purely, he insists, because he could entwine it around the music curriculum. And through the social work his degree entailed, 'I realised the magnitude of poverty and misery in Venezuela.' Abreu even served as president of the Economic Planning Commission and minister of culture, but a combination of disillusionment and health problems made him leave politics and 'devote myself entirely to music. And I found insidious the situation whereby access to music had become the privilege of the elite. The more I had studied Beethoven the man as well as the composer, the more I realised how outraged he would be by such a situation. Beethoven was a man of profound democratic humanism and thus I set out to create a means whereby music could be a way of vindicating the rights of the masses.'

El Sistema sank roots in Venezuelan society deep enough to survive the winds - hurricanes, indeed - of tumultuous political change, military coups and now the Chavez revolution. El Sistema is probably, and remarkably, the only organism immune to politics in one of the world's most highly politicised societies. Chavez made a point of taking the Simon Bolivar orchestra with him when he attended his first South American heads of state summit in Brazil in 2000, but so, probably, would the conservative opposition if it were in power. 'We are a national asset,' says Abreu, 'whoever rules the country. We are part of the community; local governments compete to have an orchestra as good as the neighbouring one.'

What was the greatest moment, I asked Dudamel, when he had to pinch himself to believe it was happening - Berlin? La Scala? Getting the job in California? 'I think it was when Maestro Abreu called me, told me I was to conduct the youth orchestra, and hung up. I ran down the corridor shouting. Then again, I think it was when I married my wife. But I'm one of those people for whom every moment is the best.'

The rehearsal resumes and focuses on a particularly difficult sequence for trumpets, Dudamel is in dialogue with a remarkable young man called Wilfrido Galarraga who rides his motorbike from the barrio of La Vega to the Caracas university each morning to work on his thesis on the methodology of music teaching before moving on to rehearse. The thesis, he says, 'is about how children can learn from lives of composers like Verdi, with his political views, or Tchaikovsky's romanticism and homosexuality. These are interesting people, and this way we both educate children and break away from the idea that classical music is for the upper classes and the rich.'

La Vega is a barrio both as desperate and defiant as the rest, but Wilfrido insists: 'I don't like this characterisation. Yes, La Vega is economically marginalised and these problems are with us, but most people cross town to work.' However, he says, 'when I joined the children's orchestra, it changed not only my life but the lives of my family. My father was drinking far too much, and all my brothers had dropped out of school. When I got hooked on my instrument, my father stopped drinking, and one by one my brothers went back to school.' We talk about Wilfrido's future, and that of the orchestra, making an analogy with the Brazilian national football team, hardly any of whom play in Brazil. How many will be picked off, like the double bassist Edicson Ruiz, who recently became the youngest musician ever to join the Berlin Philharmonic? 'I think many will stay,' says Wilfrido. 'We're a community. But we are only too aware that for every one of us, there are 10 more young people easily capable of taking our place. I'm not sure where my future lies but I am certain of one thing: that however good people say our orchestra is, the generation coming up behind us will be better than we are.'

· The Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra performs at the Edinburgh Festival on 17 August and BBC Proms on 19 August. Their second album on Deutsche Grammophon, Mahler's Symphony No5, is released on 13 August.

· This article was amended on Monday August 6 2007. Finlandia by Sibelius is not a 'symphony' but a single-movement symphonic poem, a symbol of Finnish nationalism. This has been corrected.